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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

The Mentalist

The
Mentalist is a show about Patrick Jane, a consultant for the cops who
solves crimes while seeking revenge for his family.

Spoilers
Ahoy!

This
episode basically has two plots. The main plot is the weekly case.
The characters return to the museum from the third season episode
“Red Queen”* because one of the graduate students has been
murdered. There's the usual red herrings but the suspect turns out to
be a fellow colleague because she had discovered a rare moth species.
He decided to kill her and steal the credit so that he could keep his
job. There's a lot of moments that work in this weekly case but very
few have to do with the actual mystery. It's rather the humor and the
way that it's solved that's entertaining. It's true that Jane's
method of tricking the killer into revealing himself was a bit
predictable but it was fun to watch because of the lecture he was
giving at the same time. Simon Baker proves that he's as charismatic
as ever in that scene. The humor proves to be the reason to watch
this episode as the writers inject some light moments. There's a
spectacularly great point where Rigsby tries to prove that his
dinosaur is better by doing some research only to be shot down by
Cho. It's nice to see that the series is perfectly capable of
delivering a light episode considering how dark Red John has turned
this show. The weekly case is decent and noteworthy on how funny it
was.

The
sub-plot of the episode involves poker and Grace. Grace has applied
for a program that's going to teach her advanced computer
investigative techniques. I don't remember this being brought up
before so it was a bit odd to suddenly learn about it. Granted, I had
also kind of forgotten that Lisbon had started to play poker with her
boss and a few other big shots in the law and order scene. The two
sub-plots basically converge when Betram keeps losing so he refuses
to accept the stipend to pay for Grace's computer program. He only
accepts when Jane is able to help him take over his fake bluff so
that he can win. This is kind of silly as it's basically just the
show stalling a plot without really adding to the tension or it being
necessary. It's understandable that Grace's plot needed some obstacle
that needed to be overcome but this just felt like the show was
trying too hard. She does end up going because Amanda Righetti needed
to on maternity leave. The poker sub-plot does have a saving grace
(no pun intended) when Lisbon starts to play with Lisbon. Overall,
the whole poker sub-plot felt unnecessary as Grace could have just
gone and it wouldn't have made a large difference to the narrative.

Red
in Tooth and Claw is pretty much an average episode with a decent
weekly case, great humor, and an unnecessary poker sub-plot.

*I
think. That I believe is the only episode to take place in a museum
based on my CTRL-F search.